Yes, it’s there. Look harder. It’s on the second level in the pie menu, and in the General tab in Edit. And it’s the difference between open grids and closed ones. The difference between OpenSim and Second Life.
Everything digital revolves around copying, and copies are not a technical question, but a legal one: Copyright. Laws, unlike technical processes, are not universal, nor are they always safe and clear. Legal definitions are, by default, vague enough to cover several different cases, but at the same time should be precise enough to give some understanding about what they cover, and what not. This is especially complicated with copyright, as it tries to cover a myriad of things, with a multitude of uses, some of which have not even been invented yet. (Who would have thought about whether or not a couple of prims are copyrightable 10 years ago?)
If you’ve never seen it, then you probably have not been outside of Second Life, or a comparable service. It is the first thing that struck me when I entered OSGrid: Most things could just be copied. I made it a habit to fly around or walk through sims and right-click on anything nice I saw to see if I could take a copy. Most of the times, I could.
The question about whether or not you are allowed to copy something is not easily answered. Not only would you have to know the laws and jurisdiction of your country on these matters, but also (quite often) the details of the terms of service of whatever site or service you’re currently on, which in turn are connected to the laws of the country the hosts of these reside in. Not complicated enough? Well, maybe there’s some special licenses involved which the creators themselves used to license their work, and which could override the terms of service, or not.
Usually, we just don’t care. If there’s a nice picture on the web, we just save it to our harddrives without giving it a second thought. If a friend sends us an mp3-file, we just keep it. If we blog about something we just read, we copy and paste parts of it into our blog post. And if we make something in Second Life, we use elements that are available as freebies or take textures off the net.
There are several answers. The safe one is: No, you can’t. If you want to be absolutely on the safe side, you must never copy. You can buy original copies, and you can consume them. That’s about all. The semi-safe answer is: Stick to content that’s open and free. Creative commons, open-source, free software, all these were founded with the goal to give everyone the legal ability to copy the creations thus licensed. It is only semi safe, because the free licensed stuff itself may contain material that is not freely distributable. Only because someone licenses their creations free doesn’t mean they have the legal right to do so.1 It’s a tangled mess, even with things that look relatively simple. Do you know if the musician publishing his songs under creative commons didn’t include someone elses melody in a song?2
Not caring – well, that’s a valid decision too. With most legal things, the risk of doing them is only partly in what’s written in laws; a large part of it also lies in the scope and extent of the action, if the violated party has any knowledge about and interest in the violation (and the capabilities to pursue it) and, finally, if judges will agree with them.
Copying, therefor, is risk assessment, and everyone needs to do their own. Can we copy things in Second Life? Well, the permissions may give you an idea about what the creator might have thought about that. Can we copy things out of Second Life? Not, according to Linden Lab’s Terms of Service. In most cases though, it might be relatively safe to copy things for personal use – to use them on your private standalone, for example.3 If you ask me about my things – feel free to copy.
- The Second Life Viewer code, for example, although open-sourced, contains libraries and code which are proprietary and closed. [↩]
- I even included someone elses words in a song, but that was in another country, and alas, the guy is dead – for more than 70 years. [↩]
- Things get worse – much worse – when you try to sell things you copied without permission. [↩]
Stumble it
Digg it
Tweet this
